You Can Always Blame Coyote

By Dan Whipple, 1-17-07

Poor Coyote. He gets blamed for everything.

The Crow say Coyote created the world. The Wasco say Coyote left two grizzly bears and two wolves in the sky to form the Big Dipper. The Colville say Coyote dug a hole in the Cascade Mountains to create the Columbia River Several tribes claim that Coyote brought the world fire, like Prometheus.

Coyote’s most popular role in tribal stories is as Trickster, the rebel against authority, the breaker of taboos. He is the sacred clown, buffoon, lecher, poacher, cheater. He’s also very crafty at destroying his enemies.

So Coyote was at it again last week, making the town of Baker, Montana and the organizers of an annual coyote hunt look foolish with his antics.

Billed as a tourist attraction, organizer Jerrid Geving also wrapped the event in the rural flag when he offered the hunt up as an effort predator control: “they do a lot of damage to livestock."

The world’s greatest omnivore In a study covering coyotes in Yellowstone National Park in 1937-38, the legendary biologist Adolph Murie recorded the following among “miscellaneous foor and non-food times” in 5,086 coyote droppings: Horse manure Garbage Trash Muskmelon Apple Corn refuse Paper Canvas-leather glove Rag Butter wrapper Twine Banana peel Orange peel Leather (one piece containing rivet) Cellophane Steak bone Grape seeds Mouse nest material Seven inches of curtain Pear Prune seed Match Two square inches of rubber Tinfoil Shoestring Mud Paint-covered rag Eight inches of rope Three square inches of towel Lemon rind Bacon rind Two pieces of shirt Canvas Gunny sack Isinglass Botfly larvae All this was in addition to the usual diet of mammals, birds and invertebrates. In Murie’s study, a coyote was more likely to have eaten a canvas-leather glove than a mushroom.

Now if you want to say that you just like to shoot things, there’s probably a large proportion of the U.S. population that shares your point of view. Even Coyote isn’t opposed a little gratuitous violence, carving up the heart of a giant beaver to create the Indian tribes. And coyotes will sometimes kill more than they can eat, apparently just for practice. In a controlled experiment some years ago, a researcher tested how many captive white rats a coyote would kill. He stopped counting at 96, when he ran out of rats. The coyote worked itself to exhaustion.

But if you claim that a coyote hunt is predator control, is anything other than blood sport, you’ve climbed out on a limb and sawed it off. There has been a concentrated, federal, state and locally funded, annual multimillion-dollar campaign for the last hundred years against coyotes. It hasn’t made even a tiny dent in coyote populations. In fact, Coyote has expanded his range considerably, moving into the eastern states where they have never lived in the historic past. A coyote was once spotted in New York City’s Central Park. So it’s unlikely that even a determined hunter in Baker, Montana, is going to have much impact.

These things come up every so often. Wyoming’s Campbell County Chamber of Commerce used to sponsor a "coyote shoot." In February of 1993, Chamber president Bret Taylor said, "This is not some sort of mass slaughter, but it is a way to reduce some of the devastating losses some ranchers are experiencing."

The chamber paid a five hundred dollar prize for the largest coyote shot and five hundred dollars to the person shooting the most. A bounty of twenty-five dollars was paid for each coyote and five dollars for each fox. The coyotes declined to participate. Two hundred hunters got twenty-four coyotes and twelve foxes in two days, hunting on 75 ranches. The numbers fell considerably below even pessimistic pre-hunt predictions that hunters would kill at least fifty coyotes.

One of the really odd things about this is that no one really knows what the population of coyotes is. With ungulate game animals, wildlife managers can tell you the populations down to a couple of decimal places, along with how many years of college education they’ve got. You ask how many coyotes there are, and they just say, “a lot.”

Coyote population can be estimated from their density, which is highest in the southwest and declines northward in the range. Highest densities have been recorded in Texas, at five or six animals per square mile. In the intermountain region, densities vary with prey availability, generally from one coyote per square mile to one per four square miles.

If you look at a coyote “density index,” a graph that plots density against time, it’s flat -- despite all of the millions that the gently named Wildlife Service (formerly Animal Damage Control) and the $6,000 prize pool in Baker spends on trying to get rid of them.

The most effective method of predicting coyote populations is to look at the abundance of their primary prey -- which is not livestock, no matter what they say in Baker -- lagomorphs, that is, rabbits and their kin.

There are occasional calls to bring back the poison Compound 1080, which was used in the golden age of predator control between about 1950 and 1972. But Coyote gets the last laugh there, too. Two different independent sources of information show that losses of sheep to coyote predation actually went up during the time Compound 1080 was in use. What probably happened -- although as with all things Coyote, no one can be sure -- is that coyotes simply learned to avoid lunching on carcasses, refusing to eat anything that they hadn’t killed themselves. Super-Coyote.

To protect sheep from coyotes, the most effective method is to use sheepherders. But they are hard to find, and they’re expensive. Guarding dogs work pretty well, but they aren't perfect. Flocks that are brought in to structures at night have less predation. Killing the pups in their dens can be effective, if unpopular among the animal rights crowd. But killing an individual coyote doesn’t do anything to prevent predation on livestock. Another coyote simply moves in to take over the abandoned territory. Being an opportunistic predator, this new coyote will probably learn to eat sheep.

One thing that might work -- they’re going to love this in Baker -- is to reintroduce the wolf. A lot of biologist believe that prior to white settlement, the existence of the wolf kept coyote populations in check and was responsible for keeping Coyote west of the Mississippi. When wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park, biologist Bob Crabtree indicated that wolf predation reduced coyote numbers. But wolf expert Ed Bangs of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that subsequent research indicates that absolute numbers of coyotes haven’t been affected much, but that they are forming smaller packs and acting more like coyotes are supposed to act.

In 1872, Mark Twain wrote that the coyote “is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.”

Twain’s portrait has held up well over 135 years. Coyote is still out of luck and friendless. He outpolls the devil and Darwinism as the embodiment of evil. Missing sheep? Fewer deer? Lost chihuahua? Missing children? It must have been Coyote. [End of article]